That seems exactly like something Elon would try to do, just like the idiot that tried to takeover freenode. I’d love it if the creators of Lemmy and Mastodon were able to swindle some money from him.
Comment on Elon Musk Offers to Also Ruin Wikipedia
catgirl2005@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Is there anything that stops Elon Musk from buying Lemmy or Mastadon? Even if everyone were to migrate over to the Fediverse, what stops these websites from being bought as well?
jtk@lemmy.sdf.org 11 months ago
Thelaststandn@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I don’t really know the legalitys, but there’s a few things in elons way:
- Whoever has control over Lemmy would have to be willing to sell it, pretty sure Elon couldn’t take over lemmy like he did twitter
- It’s open source, how/can does one even turn something like lemmy closed-source?
- If it was made closed source by Elon, what of the forks that already exist? Can anything be does to threaten their ongoing existence?
I don’t know the answers to 2&3, but I’m pretty sure 1 holds true; Elon can’t buy something if the owner refuses to sell.
JackbyDev@programming.dev 11 months ago
Lemmy cannot be made closed source due to the irrevocable perpetual license and the viral nature of GPL licenses, especially AGPL.
GoosLife@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Why would he pay for something that’s free…?
FangedWyvern42@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Because it’s FOSS. You can’t buy open-source software. You can use it commercially, but you can’t buy it.
Sidyctism@feddit.de 11 months ago
The fact that lemmy and mastodon arent websites, they are collections of connected instances which are managed by individuals and collectives. Elon could set up his own instance, or try to buy all the existing ones, but that wouldnt stop others from setting up new ones as well. The lemmy website is just a link-aggregator, each instance has its own website as well.
RGB@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
it is an updated blog concept.
Zehzin@lemmy.world 11 months ago
You can’t “buy” Lemmy or Mastodo any more than you can buy email or World Wide Web
catgirl2005@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Isn’t Mastadon run by an organization started by Eugen Rochko? Could this organization not be bought? Or does it not make a difference who controls Rochko’s organization? Sorry to ask such basic questions - I find the Fediverse pretty confusing.
wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
He could buy a specific mastodon instance, or a specific lemmy instance of the person running the instance decided to sell their instance. It wouldn’t effect any other instance directly.
By buying the mastodon org he might be able to influence development of the mastodon software, but the software is open source and someone would just make a musk-free fork and thungs would keep moving.
Also, an overly simplistic summary of the fediverse is that instead of one reddit run by the reddit corp, anyone can run their own reddit (lemmy) instance. Each instance can talk to each other instance and access data from each other instance. So instances that talk to each other effectively function like one big combined instance.
catgirl2005@lemm.ee 11 months ago
So if Musk said to himself, “I’m going to buy Mastadon from Rochko and fill all the instances with ads!”, he would be able to do that but we could always just fork and create “Mastadon 2” and then everything would be normal again? Would our content and followers and stuff follow us from Mastadon 1 to Mastadon 2? Or would it just be that the instances would have to switch from 1 to 2 and nothing would really change in terms of user experience?
Armacadia@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Mastodon is just one of the many frontends for ActivityPub, the protocol behind the whole thing. While Mastodon software is indeed is written and maintained by an organization, it is nonprofit, and doesn’t have any control over the actual Mastodon instances since those are basically run by enthusiasts
catgirl2005@lemm.ee 11 months ago
This makes sense, thank you. I’m becoming so aware of how little I know about software (I had to look up the term frontend).
Is this right: Mastadon is an open source frontend and ActivityPub is the open source backend. And Mastadon is kind of like a tool that people use to create instances. The instances keep all of their data on their own servers, but the servers can talk to each other so every server has access to data from every other server. So if Musk bought Mastadon, he wouldn’t have control of all the individual servers’ data, and if Musk bought a server, all the users who wanted to could switch to another server without losing any of their data. Does this mean that every server holds a copy of all of the data from the whole network of servers?